HOPR Is an All-in-One App for Bike Share, Ride Share, and Public Transit

A new app by bike-share company CycleHop lets you find, plan, and pay for different ways to get around a city

HOPR scans for nearby bike-share systems and other transportation modes to give you real-time info on pricing, travel time, and availability. Photograph courtesy of CycleHop

Bike share is a fairly new phenomenon in the US, with the first major system—Denver’s B-cycle—appearing in 2010. But it has since spread across the country, as a handful of companies work with dozens of cities and college campuses to roll out rentable bikes for tourists and residents alike.

Last year saw the rise of another iteration of the trend: privately operated dockless bike share, which made its way to Seattle from China last summer and soon began cropping up in cities from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. As many as five different companies may offer dockless bike share in one place at any given time.

With all these ways to pedal around a city—not to mention ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, as well as old-school cabs and public transit—planning even simple trips can become overwhelming. As Josh Squire, CEO of the bike-share company CycleHop, put it, “You have so many options, but how do you choose?”

That’s the question behind CycleHop’s new app, a trip-planning tool that not only recommends different options based on price, time, and availability, but also lets you pay for them without ever leaving the interface. Called HOPR—pronounced like “hopper,” as in it helps you “hop” around the city—the app takes into account bike share, public transit, ride-share services like Uber, car-share services like Zipcar, and even more arcane transportation modes like water taxis and scooter share.

“We wanted to give away for our consumers the ability to scan nearby transit options around them, what it costs, and how much time it will take to get somewhere,” Squire said.

Unlike other trip-planning apps like Waze or the “directions” tool in Google Maps, HOPR’s creators didn’t want it to prioritize driving over cycling. CycleHop runs bike-share systems in 15 cities (including Vancouver, Phoenix, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Santa Monica, California) and it would clearly benefit from getting more people on two wheels. But Squire said the app will also display any bike-share service that wants to be listed, including dockless ones.

How does it work? Let’s say you’re visiting a new city or campus and need to get across town. You open the app and search for nearby travel options, getting real-time info on the prices and travel times of each. You can either take recommendations from the app or customize routes based on whatever modes you prefer.

Actually paying for all these listed services is a more complicated prospect, but as HOPR spreads its creators hope that bike-share companies, public transit agencies, ride-share startups, and others will want to integrate their payment technologies into the app, seeing it as an opportunity for exposure and referrals. Squire pointed to Uber’s recent partnership with Jump, a dockless e-bike startup, as a model.

Another aim is to package payments together. “If we notice your tendency is toward three modes of transit, we’ll study that algorithm and will offer you a combination pass,” Squire said. He likened it to websites that allow you to book flights, rental cars, and hotel rooms in one go.

Should HOPR take off and form partnerships with enough transportation services and start-ups, it may become something like the Expedia of multimodal urban transportation. “We want to make it easy for people to access, no matter what the mode is,” Squire said.

HOPR debuted on Monday at the National Shared Mobility Summit in Chicago. It’s now available in beta in Chicago and plans to expand to Los Angeles and Ottawa, Canada, this spring.

Please enter your email or turn off your ad blocker to access all content on

Are you sure you want to log out?

If you are the only person using this device,
there’s no need to log out. Just exit this page
and you won’t have to sign in again. But if
you’re on a public or shared computer, log out
to keep your account secure.